The text delves into the historical context and critiques of SQL, highlighting its evolution from a simple ad-hoc query language to a de facto standard for relational databases, largely due to its adoption by major companies like IBM and Oracle. Despite its ubiquity, SQL has faced criticism for issues such as lack of orthogonality, compactness, and consistency, alongside problematic handling of NULL values, which have contributed to its complexity and inefficiencies. The emergence of NoSQL databases partly stemmed from dissatisfaction with SQL's limitations, though they abandoned the relational model's benefits. To address these shortcomings, EdgeQL has been developed as an alternative, offering a more powerful, consistent, and user-friendly query language that maintains the strengths of the relational model while streamlining integration with contemporary application data models and supporting advanced features like JSON, REST, and GraphQL backends.